
Qass. 



Book _1 

.d : 



THE isr j^TX oisr ^ & sopii^oatv. 



DISCOURSE , , 



ON THE DEATH OF 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 



DELIVERED IN THE 



San Francisco, April i6th, 1865. 
By Rev. J. D. STRONG, 



PASTOR. 



Published by the Larkin St. Congregation. 




SAN FRANCISCO: 

GEORQE L. KENNY & CO 

1865. 







^ 



THE 3Sr -A. T I O IsT ' S S O 11 R O "W - 



DISCOUKSE 



ON THB DEATH OF 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 



DELIVERED IN THB 



San Francisco, April i6th, 1865. 



By Rev. J. D. STRONG, 



PASTOR. 



Fublisbed by the Iiarkin St. Congregation. 



SAN FRANCISCO: 

GEORGE L. KENNY & CO 

1865. 



DISCOURSE. 



" Her gates shall lament and modkn, and she being desolate shall sit upon 
THE GROUND." — Isaiah 3 : 26. 

The scene presented by our city to-day is unpre- 
cedented in the history of America. Every flag in 
town drooping at half-mast ; every church and public 
building, and nearly every store and private dwelling, 
draped in black, and eloquent with grief ; faces that had 
scarcely shown a trace of sentiment for years, flashing 
or lowering with intense feeling ; hard, stern-featured 
men weeping like women ; every voice hushed to a 
whisper, yet keyed up with a will and resolution which 
no words can utter ; the very air alive and electrical 
with emotion — all, all make it evident that the hearts 
of our citizens are touched with sorrow as they have 
never been touched before. These same sad sights and 
sounds of woe are everywhere around us. They are 
seen and heard in all the towns and vine -clad valleys 
of the State. They are echoed back from our granite 
hills and snow-capped sierras. They are in all our bor- 
ders, from the Klamath to the Colorado. 

Nor are we, on this distant Pacific slope, alone in our 
grief. The heart of the wisest, the best, and, prospect- 



ively, the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, 
throbs to-day, like the heart of one man, in every town, 
and hamlet, and cottage in the land, from the green 
and flower-clad Coast Range of California to the gran- 
ite hills of New Hampshire — from the wild woods of 
Maine to the most southern point where Freedom can 
find a place for her feet to rest upon. The waves of 
such sorrow as we have never before known as a nation 
sweep over us to-day, and over all our j^eople, from the 
Golden Gate to Massachusetts Bay — frcfsn the Great 
Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The civilized world has 
never exhibited a sublimer spectacle of grief. Nor 
does history record any other event so important and 
far-reaching in its consequences, since the assassination 
of Julius Caesar, as that which now afflicts our hearts ; 
And even that event is not to be compared with this ; 
for he was slain for subverting the liberties of his coun- 
try, but our President for defending and perpetuating 
civil liberty and human freedom for America and the 
world. Our grief, then, is no common grief; our gates 
lament and mourn with a sorrow as sublime as our 
mission and destiny as a nation. We sit upon the 
ground with a desolation of heart as far-reaching as 
humanity. 

We mourn, first of all, because our head as a nation 
has been taken away. Abraham Lincoln, as an indi- 
vidual, was the standard-bearer of a party, and as such, 
in this place, I do not propose to speak of him ; but as 
the President of the United States, he belonged to 



every man, woman, and child in the land ; and his loss 
is a national calamity in which all partake — a calamity 
that reaches even the humblest "mud-sill " of society as 
well as the tall columns, and strong pillars, and graceful 
capitals of our social life. Our President is the Presi- 
dent of no one section, party, or clique ; he belongs to 
all ; he is the embodiment of all the wills and- interests 
in the land ; when he is once inaugurated in power, we 
all own him ; we each have a personal relation to him 
and an individual interest in him. His death, then, 
cannot and ought not to be regarded in a party light. 
We are all bereaved ; we are all afflicted ; we all mourn. 
At such an hour as this, when the hand of God is on us 
as a jDeople, no man who is a man can possibly go down 
and grovel in the gutters of party with the mere poli- 
tician. As American citizens we stand on an infinitely 
higher platform ; as kings and sovereigns of the land, 
none of us can so far forget where we are and what we 
are as to look at our national bereavement from a par- 
tisan stand-point ; and every one among us, if there be 
any such, who is so unmindful of his duty and responsi- 
bility as one of the rulers and pillars of the Republic, 
as to feel indifferent, or profess to feel indifferent, at 
this terrible calamity which has befallen the State, is 
not worthy to be an American citizen : he has no busi- 
ness in a country like this ; he belongs to other regions 
and other institutions ; he is a dangerous element in a 
Republic, and should be marked and watched as an 
enemy of humanity and an enemy of God, as well as an 
enemy of the Government under which he lives. But 



6 



few, if any such, I trust, are found among us. Our 
grief, like our bereavement, is common to us all. We 
all feel the heavy blow on our hearts ; we all lament 
and mourn ; we all sit in the dust and are afflicted. 
These outward symbols of our grief are but hints and 
glimpses of what the nation feels — of what we feel — of 
what every friend of the country and of humanity feels. 

Again, we mourn because we are deprived of one on 
whom, under God, we had leaned for safety in this crisis 
of our history. During the last four years our situation 
has been critical. At times we have held our very 
breath for anxiety. We have looked to the past with 
wonder and to the future with misgivings too profound 
for utterance. It has required sagacity, delicacy, and 
tact far beyond what most of us can comprehend to so 
shape public sentiment, control the mad passions of the 
people, and direct their energies, that we could pass 
through such scenes as we have passed through without 
the destruction of our free institutions. And now, that 
the more stormy crisis of our struggle is over, the diffi- 
culty and danger of our situation is by no means at 
an end. The work of reconstructing these dismem- 
bered States, of binding up the bleeding wounds of 
the nation, of winning back the spirit of concord and 
fraternal love among all sections of the Republic, and 
of laying new foundations for a purified and rejuve- 
nated Government, now and for the coming ages, as far 
exceeds in difficulty and importance any thing that is 
past as the light of the sun exceeds the light of the 



little candle that flickers in its beams. And to carry 
us through these thickening dangers we had leaned on 
our noble-hearted President with such trust and con- 
sciousness of safety as that which a child feels as it 
rests in the arms of its father. Nor was our confidence 
a bhnd, unthinking, unreasoning confidence. We had 
tried him. We had tried him in the most difficult 
places. We had proved his sagacity, capability, and 
honesty. Though we may sometimes have deemed him 
too slow, in our unpatience and hasty zeal, results have 
shown that he was wiser than we. He has uniformly 
been safe and rehable. His main fault, if fault he had, 
as the head of the nation, was his excessive humanity. 
He has sometimes seemed, to us, to be too yielding, too 
forbearing, too lenient ; yet we have always been able 
to say of him — what can be said of but few others in 
such situations — he has never betrayed or deserted a 
principle. When his positions have finally been taken, 
he has stood like a shaft of adamant in a stormy ocean, 
which no bowlings of the storm or dashing of the waves 
could shake. And the longer we have proved him, the 
greater has been our confidence, till we, and the people 
generally, have come to feel that he only could guide 
us safely through the stormy scenes of the next four 
years. But he is gone, gone from us, and we feel like 
a lost mariner afloat on an angry ocean without a pilot. 
Our loss seems to be irreparable. We know not where 
to look for another to stand in the breach and beat 
back the hosts of dangers that thicken around our 
pathway. Therefore are our hearts stricken with grief 



8 



unutterable. " We all mourn sore like doves ; we look 
for judgment, but there is none ; for salvation, but it 
is far off from us ;" and a wail of sorrow, that pierces 
the heavens, and will be heard in every valley and 
mountain glen of the civilized world, goes up to G-od 
to-day from every section and hamlet of our land. 
Civilization has never before witnessed such a scene. 
Our grief is unparalleled in history. 

We mourn to-day, too, because civil liberty and the 
cause of humanity are still in conflict with such fiendish 
and barbarous foes. Till our lamented civil war burst 
upon us like a whirlwind of horrors, we thought our 
civilization had outgrown the barbarities of earlier ages. 
We thought that only savages could murder their pris- 
oners in cold blood, and incarcerate them in dens worse 
than hell, and torture them with filth and starvation 
more horrible than the Inquisition. We could not 
believe that American citizens could rival the cannibals 
of the South Sea Islands, like wild beasts, mutilate the 
dead, or, like the ancient barbarians of Cythia, slay 
their enemies, make drinking cups of their skuUs, and 
ornaments for women and children, of their bones. We 
have read the details of such barbarities with disgust 
and horror ; and, although their truth has been corrob- 
orated from a multitude of independent sources, we 
have been unable still really to believe things so horrible 
and astounding of any of our fellow-citizens. Even 
now we can scarcely convince ourselves that any section 
of the Republic can breed such savages — such devils in 



9 

human shape. Yet we can not close our hearts to the 
fact that this spirit of demons, with which we have 
struggled for four years, has at last culminated in the 
terrible crime, which to-day curdles our blood with 
horror. This murder in cold blood of an innocent 
unarmed man — the representative and executor of the 
will of the American people — shows us, as nothing else 
could, with what we are contending. It shows us that 
neither we nor our institutions can be safe till such bar- 
barism is weeded out of the Repubhc, and a higher 
style of civihzation takes its place. It Ufts the curtain a 
little, and gives us a glimpse of our present position, and 
of the future, and we start back with horror and grief 
unutterable from the scene thus disclosed before us. 
How can we enter the path which God seems to have 
marked out for us ? How can we go forward to the 
accomplishment of our mission as the champions of 
human rights and human progress? We draw back 
from the struggle with lamentation and mourning. We 
sit upon the ground and are desolate in our grief. Oh ! 
that God in mercy would spare us from such a mission ! 
is the language forced to-day from every thinking heart 
in the land. 

We mourn, too, with equal grief, over the injury this 
crime has inflicted on the cause of Republican liberty 
among us, and throughout the world. Our enemies 
will point to it as the culmination of democratic weak- 
ness and folly. It will take generations of good order 
and wise behavior on our part, to wipe out this re- 



10 



proach in the estimation of mankind. Our reputation, 
our democratic principles, our hold on the sympathy 
of the people throughout the world, have received a 
blow, in this crime, the consequences of which ages 
cannot repair. Even our own faith in our institutions 
is jostled, if not shaken. Our hope, our confidence, our 
enthusiasm are shocked ; and we see our position, as a 
people, as we have never seen it before. In wan- 
dering among the volcanic scenery of the Hawaiian 
Islands, I have frequently passed over immense cav- 
erns, roofed over with a thin crust of lava, where my 
horse's feet would sometimes slump through, where 
every foot-fall would roll off in fearful echoes, like 
subterranean thunder, and where sections of this thin 
crust of rock had fallen in, disclosing a yawning gulf 
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet in depth. The 
feelings of the traveler amid such scenes, can only be 
imagined, not described. Every sound calls to him 
with a warning cry : 

"Turn, mortal, turn; thy danger know; 

Where'er thy foot can tread, 
The earth rings hollow from below, 

And warns thee of her dead." 

The feelings inspired by such scenes are just like 
those we experience to-day. We shudder at the 
thought of the yawning chasm that may be but a step 
before us. The dreadful echoes beneath our feet 
awaken feelings in us that no words of mine can ex- 
press. We all feel them — we are all startled and 
aroused — we are all filled with the most painful emo- 
tions of grief and solicitude. 



11 

And we each feel injured. We are the real sover- 
eigns of the land — each of us is a king, and the Presi- 
dent was but the embodiment of us all. The assassin's 
weapon did not reach him so much as us ; the blow was 
aimed at our hearts ; we are the injured party. The 
loss of a single human life, like the loss of Abraham 
Lincoln as an individual, is of small consequence. It 
is not that we mourn to-da}^ ; it is the crime committed 
against the cause of humanity — against the American 
people — against us, the sovereigns of the land, that 
fills us with such grief, and shame, and indignation ; 
we feel that the whole fabric of our institutions is 
shaken, and that all the interests of society are stricken 
down. It is for this reason, mainly, that we mourn as 
we do. It is for this reason that our gates lament with 
bitter weeping, and that there are sights and sounds 
of woe in every hamlet and dwelling in the land. 

But it is God's doings, and we should bow before 
Him with submissive hearts. He is chastising us for 
our pride, and folly, and wickedness as a people. We 
have sinned against him long, and with a high hand. 
We have eaten up, without remorse, or any feeling 
of humanity, the native tribes of the land ; we have 
bound fetters of servitude on the limbs of his dear 
ones ; we have tolerated and nursed the most infa- 
mous and unrighteous principles, and the most brutal 
and barbarous passions ; we have been puffed up with 
pride in view of our position ; we have forgotten the 
laws of Him who rules on earth and among men, as 



12 



well as among the angels of Heaven, and He is now 
correcting us for our folly. He is making us feel how 
we have strayed from the straight and narrow path ; 
He is making us feel that sin in nations, as in indi- 
viduals, invariably bears a terrible harvest of sorrow. 
We deserve the chastisement we are receiving ; and let 
us bow humbly before His footstool, acknowledging 
our errors as a people, repenting from our hearts 
of the sins that have brought these calamities on us ; 
let us hear the Great Ruler speaking to us to-day, 
and saying: "The nation that will not serve me 
shall be destroyed." 

Nor should we regard this calamity simply in the 
light of a punishment. God, undoubtedly, intends it 
as a lesson to us for the future. And we needed just 
such a lesson to show us what we are doing, and what 
is our duty. We are about to lay the foundations of a 
reconstructed Republic, and there was danger that we 
should not fully understand the nature of the work we 
have in hand ; there was danger that we should, after 
all the sufferings, and losses, and bloodshed of the last 
four years, heal the hurt of the Government slightly ; 
that we should patch up a temporary peace out of dis- 
cordant and jarring elements ; that we should commit 
again the fatal mistake of our fathers, and lay the foun- 
dations of the new Republic on a dangerous com- 
promise with a system of barbarism and oppression, 
which civilized society has long since outgrown. God 
evidently designs that we shall have no peace based on 
such a sacrifice of the republican principle. He means 



13 



that we shall have no peace on this continent brought 
about by the equilibrium of two antagonistic and 
essentially hostile forms of society. We are warned 
by the past, that such a peace is a dangerous arrange- 
ment, and that its fruit, in the end, is evil, and can be 
only evil. This is the lesson God is teaching us to-day. 
This is the lesson He has given us to learn ; and if one 
calamity will not enforce it on our hearts, there are 
others in store for us. No one can read the history 
of the last four years, without seeing that God has a 
purpose to accomplish by this civil war that devastates 
our land. We have been slow— exceedingly slow— in 
reading that purpose, though it has been as plain as 
the hand-writing on the wall of Belshazzar's ban- 
queting hall. He means that the slave sj^stem, and 
the barbarities necessarily connected with it, shall be 
wiped out of America, and every event that has trans- 
pired during the last four years, serves only to illus- 
trate and enforce that thought on our hearts. The 
sooner we can understand God's purposes, and get into 
the current with them, the better it will be for us and 
for the people ; but if we fight against His purposes, 
and refuse to hear the voice of His providence, we 
must still expect just such terrible chastisements as 
that which so afflicts our hearts to-day. 

Let us, then, repent of our sins as a people, and not 
only repent, but bring forth works meet for repentance. 
Let us unbind the shackles from the limbs of our op- 
pressed brothers. Let us put down the spirit of inhu- 
manity and barbarism that has so long stalked among 



14 

us, the ghost of our murdered principles. Let us lay 
our foundations for the future on universal freedom, 
equal rights, Christian civilization, and obedience to 
law. Let us not entail on our children the evil our 
fathers have handed down to us ; but now, while God 
gives us the opportunity, let us tear away from our 
new foundations every antiquated and barbarous prin- 
ciple and usage, and act wisely for this and the com- 
ing ages. If we allow ourselves to be thus instructed 
and guided by God's providence, we shall find that 
that which seems such a calamity to us to-day is really 
a blessing in disguise. The first battle of Bull Run was 
the best thing for us that ever happened in the history 
of our country. It inspired the nation with a new 
spirit, and gave shape and character to all the events 
that have followed in its train ; and I believe the assas- 
sination of our President is an event of equal signifi- 
cance, and will do a hundred fold more to shape our 
future than his life could have done, though prolonged 
to the age of Methusalah. Let us, then, read the lesson 
aright, and go forward, and God will be with us. He 
will never leave us, nor forsake us, but will lead us, as 
He did our fathers, through the fire and through the 
cloud ; and by this terrible baptism of blood He is lay- 
ing on us, He will wash us from our sins. Even now, 
from the corpse of our murdered dead, we can hear His 
voice saying: "Behold, I have refined thee, but not 
with silver ; I have chosen thee in the furnace of 
affliction." 



